1) Obtain a Pollen Box. Read POLLEN 101 to learn the details on what makes a great pollen box.

2) Obtain some herbs. Since the pollen box produces a powder, and powders are dry, your herbs must be dry as well. Really moist herbs broken up in a pollen box will only lead you to two results, and niether is good. First, your screen will clog up more quickly. If you herbs are always dry, the screen (or wire mesh) should last for several months before requiring a cleaning. The other result of moist herbs is.....THEY DON'T PRODUCE ANY POLLEN !! So, kids, please keep your moist herbs out of the box. A tip on drying your herbs quickly, but not too quickly.....place them in a brown paper bag for a few hours, or even up to a day. The brown paper sucks the moisture right out of those herbs. You don't want to dry em up to quickly because the slower it dries, more crystals will appear on the herbs . Dry it too quickly and you get fewer crystals, and as you learned in POLLEN 101, crystals = pollen !!!!

3) Use the box (like you would use a rolling tray or any other stash box) to break apart, clean and sort your herbs. Every time you work with your herbs, tiny crystals (often referred to as glands or trichromes) and "shake flakes" fall through the screen (or mesh) and collect on a mirror, producing the extremely potent pollen. Even stems and seeds are loaded with pollen....let them move around the screen while you're working with the herbs. Some people like to "rape" the herbs of the crystals by rubbing the herbs into the screen or shaking the box with the lid on. We think this is totally unnecessary. Just take it as it comes naturally. It will probably produce more quickly than you expect. We don't recommend doing either the rubbing or shaking side to side. Just use the box like a regular stash box to break the herbs in. Just working with it (breaking up and cleaning) is enough to produce the powder, especially when you scrape the cleaned herbs into a pile because you're rubbing (or lightly scraping) the screen when you do this.

4) Collect the pollen into a pile (a razor blade works best), and use it as a "bowl-topper" or save it for later. This stuff will take you to the next level !! Any herbs, from the cheap stuff to the super kind, will produce pollen. You will find that different herbs will produce different colors and grades of pollen.